“You do?”
“At the appropriate time,” Alex said. “I’d like to return. Unfinished business.”
An ironic smile crossed his face. “Unfinished business,” he said. “Yes, we agree. You seem drawn to unfinished business, don’t you, Alex? Venezuela. Ukraine…”
“That does seem to be the path that’s before me right now,” she said. “It’s not where I thought I’d be right now, but it’s where I am.”
He nodded.
“I know how that works,” he said. “Show me someone for whom that isn’t the case, and I’ll show you someone who sat back in life and never took chances, never tried to do the right thing. I admire you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Be careful in Ukraine,” he said. “I’ve heard it’s a godless place.” “
I’ll do my best,” she said.
“I know that,” he answered. “Just while you’re doing your best, be careful also.” He moved back to his desk. “I have a check for you for your work in South America. I’ve rounded it up to fifty thousand dollars. Don’t protest. Try to find some time to enjoy it and a place to relax with it,” he said.
She accepted it in an unmarked envelope, which she wouldn’t open till later in the day when she would mail it to her bank in Washington.
“I’ll do my best,” she said again.
A few minutes later, she was out of his apartment and back down on Fifth Avenue, walking home slowly, enjoying the anonymity that a crowded New York sidewalk always afforded her.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
The next morning, Alex and Michael Cerny were on an Air France flight from New York to Paris. Two hours into the flight, sitting side by side in business class, Cerny took out his Palm Pilot. He applied his fingerprint to the security section and powered it up.
“I want you to read some files,” Cerny said. “CIA and NSA stuff. They’ll tell you more about why we’re going to Paris.”
“Full disclosure?” she asked with an edge.
“Call it what you want,” Cerny said. “You need to know some backstory.”
He handed the Palm Pilot to Alex. She began with a CIA file that was, as much as anything, a continuation of what she had read on Yuri Federov back in January. But it added to her knowledge.
Federov had been on a CIA list for several months as a foreign national in whom the Agency had taken a “special interest.” At the same time, Federov had developed a long list of enemies in the underworlds of North America, South America, and Europe. So many, that fear of his enemies had impeded his movements for years. Thus from time to time, Federov had been in the habit of traveling through Europe in the guise of a priest.
But within the last eighteen months, Federov had taken the guise one step further. He had hired a double, a retired actor from the National Theater of Hungary. The double was a friend named Daniel Katzman. Katzman bore a resemblance to him. Hence Katzman traveled as Father Daniel, a Federov decoy-within-a-decoy so that Federov himself could move about the world more freely.
Daniel turned out to be in the role of a lifetime, or, more accurately, the last role of his lifetime. A pair of assassins shot him to death in a French café named L’etincelle during the first days of the new year. Alex noted the date. January 2. The French police were still working on the case, the file said, the one of the man in priestly garb shot dead over a cognac and a cigar at a café in the Marais.
From the shooting, a triple riddle posed itself:
Q1: When is a dead priest not really a dead priest?
A1: When the dead Russian mobster is not a Russian mobster either.
Q2: Then when is a dead Russian mobster not really a dead Russian mobster?
A2: When he wasn’t even a priest either. He was an actor and a friend of the man who was supposed to be shot.
And then the biggest question of alclass="underline"
Q3: When is an underworld “hit” not an underworld “hit”?
A3: When neither the victim nor the perps are members of the underworld.
The electronic file ended abruptly. Cerny guided Alex to a second one that discussed a pair of agents who worked for the CIA, and not with great efficiency. Their names were Peter Glick and Edythe Osuna. They were married to each other, or seemed to be, but didn’t work at it very hard. They had picked up a trail that they felt belonged to Federov by monitoring flights from Kiev to the capitals of Western Europe, notably London, Paris, Madrid, and Geneva, places where Federov either had business interests, money stashed, or both.
They tracked their target to Paris and asked for permission from Langley to proceed with an “intervention.” The request went all the way up to cabinet level. Permission was granted. They acted. Next thing anyone knew, the secure faxes and phone lines were exploding between Langley and Paris and Langley and Rome.
Edythe and Peter fled to Madrid after Paris, then Rome. Yet for people who should have been disappearing into the background, they were reckless, physically incapable of keeping a low profile. Nor were they upstanding citizens. They moved in a shadowy world of illegal gun dealers, smugglers, swindlers, sexual merchants, and con artists. They frequented nightclubs in Paris and Rome where couples paired off with strangers. They lived on the social and political edge of the world.
They picked up a trail for Federov. But they picked up the wrong trail, one that was set out as a trap.
As soon as Alex saw those names, a bell rang within her. Her mind flashed back to the club in Kiev, her quasi-sober conversation with Federov, as well as the suggestive questions posed by her.
Federov, in Russian: “Have you ever heard of a pair of Americans named Peter Glick and Edythe Osuna?”
Alex: “New names on me. Should I know them?”
Federov: Maybe. They are involved in this visit by your president.”
Alex: “Part of the delegation?”
Her favorite gangster: “No. They’re a pair of American spies. They were recently retired.”
So the tale that followed made sense. Edythe and Peter established a procedure for a hit on Federov in Paris. They quickly wired Washington and Langley for approval. No one ever asked them if they were sure their target was who they thought it was. Accuracy of that sort was the least of the details attended to. Like much CIA intelligence over the last decade, it wasn’t just faulty, it had so many holes in it that a truck could have driven through it with its doors open.
Peter and Edythe were known in security circles in Europe and known by the underworld also. They were recognized to be Western operatives, most likely American.
After the mistaken killing in Paris, they were ripe for a setup.
Alex continued to read.
The setup came when Federov wanted to strike back. First, he had set up his old friend Katzman possibly to be whacked in his place. Then he took it as a personal insult that Katzman had been so victimized.
From his own experiences in European nightlife, Federov knew a young woman for the job. One night in Rome, Peter and Edythe met a young woman named Lana Bassoni who lived in Rome. She was very pretty, a sometime model and sometime artist’s model. But she was married to a musician who wasn’t going anywhere. There was also another detail about Lana that Peter and Edythe would never had guessed until it was too late. She had once worked for Federov at one of the after-hours mob joints he ran in New York. She had been a hostess-plus-a-bit-more, depending how much a client had to spend and what a client wanted. It all made sense.
The meeting at the club in Rome-Lana, Peter, and Edythe-was made to look like a coincidence. But it was anything but. About an hour after meeting, Peter and Edythe disappeared for a while. The next morning, Lana did too.
Alex looked up from the Palm Pilot. “I assume there’s more,” she said to Cerny.
“Of course,” he said. “Short and sweet. Do you want to read it in English or Italian?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Give me both in case I sense something wrong with the translations.”